In the Hiding Zone

Pakistan’s lawless tribal borderland has become a virtual jihadi highway.

Khalid Wazir, who is thirty and wears his hair in a mini-pompadour, twirls the tips of his mustache when he’s nervous. The habit was little in evidence when I first met him, two years ago, through his cousins, a family of generous Wazirs who had befriended me while I was reporting on the American military campaign in Afghanistan. In those days, Khalid occupied himself, when he felt like it, by selling satellite phones in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar, but he often spent his days stalking sandgrouse with his dogs Floppy and Scooby and complaining about local Talibs, who refused to let women dance at family weddings. But last summer Khalid assumed the position of Khan Bahadur, or Brave Leader, and became the nominal chief of some thirty thousand people in North Waziristan, a twenty-nine-hundred-square-mile tribal area that runs along the thousand-mile border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the Raj, the British granted the title to powerful tribal leaders in order to forge a link between the colonial government and the Pashtun tribesmen. Khalid’s grandfather Mianwar Shah was the first Khan Bahadur. Khalid inherited the title from an uncle, through a series of familial turns.

Today, Khalid’s face has thinned, and his laugh, which used to punctuate almost every sentence, is a rare occurrence. Being Khan Bahadur comes with not only the dubious trappings of a colonial factotum but a catalogue of obligations to his tribesmen, the Wazirs. He must settle their land disputes, pay their medical bills, offer them a bed when they show up at his door, and act as their emissary when they are arrested for smuggling commodities like wood from the tribal areas into Pakistan. Worse, the job description has now come to include negotiating deals between the Pakistani military and the tribal elders, or maliks, whose people are often accused of sheltering Al Qaeda terrorists. By virtue of a manufactured title, Khalid has become the de-facto prince of a forbidden kingdom, a putative expert on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and gatekeeper to a region traditionally closed to outsiders.

Not long ago, an international news organization called Khalid to ask if it was true that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Waziristan. “How was I supposed to know?” he asked me afterward. “If he’s there, why don’t they go catch him? I have nothing to do with it.” He went on, “I am the Khan Bahadur. I am the chief. I know there are terrorists in Waziristan? George Bush was elected President by the state of Florida. His brother is governor of Florida. George Bush knew there were terrorists training in Florida?”

Waziristan, North and South, composes two of Pakistan’s seven semi-autonomous tribal areas that border its North-West Frontier Province. (The others are Khyber, Kurram, Orakzai, Mohmand, and Bajaur.) A stretch of arid, deserted land, Waziristan has served as a buffer between rival empires since the eleventh century, when, as the story goes, a tribe of Wazirs (advisers) migrated there from central Afghanistan. The Wazirs are Pashtuns, a cluster of about sixty families that occupy the tribal belt along the Durand line, which nominally divides Afghanistan from Pakistan. According to tradition, they are the sons of a common ancestor, Qais (a descendant of Saul), who was converted to Islam by the Prophet himself. Qais is said to have had four sons; the fourth, Karlanri, a foundling, is the father of the Wazirs. Of all the Pashtun tribes, the Wazirs are known as the most conservative and irascible: the ones to give the most trouble to any outsider who attempts to penetrate their land, which they consider as veiled, or in purdah.

No foreign invader, from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the British Empire, has ever been able to control the Wazirs. For both the British and the government of Pakistan, the notoriety of the wild Pashtun tribesmen conveniently allowed them to neglect the border. One result is that the Wazirs’ ethnic identity has begun to yield to the influence of radical Islam, and the region is now home to a variety of Central Asians, including Uzbeks, Chechens, and Uighurs (Islamists from the Xinjiang province of China). More recently, the region has become a haven for Al Qaeda members. As Islamic fighters fled the mountains of Afghanistan, Waziristan became a virtual jihadi highway. Some settled near the South Waziristan town of Wana, reportedly building new training camps and launching attacks across the border in Afghanistan.

The United States, which has twenty thousand troops pursuing Taliban and Al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan, has embarked upon a seventy-three-million-dollar project to secure the border. As part of its antiterrorist strategy, the U.S. relies on the Pakistani Army to be its “anvil,” and President Bush has asked Congress for a five-year, three-billion-dollar assistance package for Pakistan, and has granted it the status of a major non-nato ally. The U.S. has also earmarked twenty-four million dollars for the construction, by the Pakistani Army Corps of Engineers and private contractors, of a web of roads throughout Waziristan and the rest of Pakistan’s tribal belt. Earlier this year, in an effort to capture bin Laden, the Pakistani military launched a series of operations against Al Qaeda, sending seventy thousand troops into the tribal areas on the new roads. If bin Laden was there, he eluded them. In general, the relative failure of the military’s efforts in Waziristan reflects a deeper ambivalence about betraying its own. Some observers believe that it wasn’t until this winter, when two assassination attempts were made against Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, and American pressure increased, that efforts to drive Al Qaeda from Waziristan became serious. Not surprisingly, the Wazirs and other local tribesmen aren’t happy about these incursions. And their inherent contempt for the Pakistani troops is only deepened by their view, which I heard voiced repeatedly in Waziristan, that the Pakistanis were acting as mere agents of the United States.

Washington has also launched a development program in the tribal area. The United States Agency for International Development (usaid) is rehabilitating a hundred and thirty schools and digging wells. Many of the programs, which are intended to mollify the tribesmen, started in the nineteen-nineties as an attempt to eradicate narcotics trafficking. The U.S. government was already working on a crop-substitution program to replace poppies with chili peppers and other foodstuffs. “One way we can address anti-U.S. sentiment is by providing some things the community leaders think they need,” a Western diplomat in Islamabad said. “They will appreciate the U.S.’s assistance.” Yet it’s hard to imagine chili peppers defusing the fury of the Wazirs. “There have been social programs since the nineteen-seventies in the tribal areas,” Husain Haqqani, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, D.C., told me. “I don’t think there are any empirical data to suggest that after your house has been intrusively searched you say, ‘Oh, those are the good guys! They put the water fountain in my village.’ ”

In any case, the United States’ goal is now the same as that of the Pakistani operations: ferreting out Al Qaeda. “We have been pressing Pakistan ever since the fall of the Taliban to deny use of its territory to Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants,” a senior official at the State Department said. “We certainly believe there are remnants of Al Qaeda or those closely allied with it up there. There will need to be a continuing effort. This is not something they’re going to do with one three-day operation.” When it comes to the welfare of the tribesmen, he went on, “It’s U.S. policy to try as much as we can to assist these people. But you can’t just walk in with a bunch of Americans and say, ‘Hi! We’re trying to help.’ ”

On a late-spring morning, I travelled with Khalid along one of Waziristan’s new roads. Since the tribesmen hold the United States accountable for actions taken by the Pakistani military, all Westerners, already suspect, are outlawed. The Pakistani government itself has banned foreigners from visiting the region. Because of Khalid’s position, however, the ban didn’t apply to me. (Later, when I visited the area without him, I was detained for several hours by Pakistani military intelligence. A Newsweek reporter travelling with me was held for six weeks, along with our driver.)

To an outsider, most of Waziristan seems utterly desolate, as if a flood had just receded from its surface. Along the Afghan border, eight-thousand-foot mountains descend into plains of petrified mud. The horizon is broken only by three kinds of structures: brick pickets, or forts—single crenellated towers built and abandoned by the British—from which Pakistani troops now peer down at passersby; the mud fortresses of Pashtun tribesmen, who live in groups of a hundred or so behind twenty-foot walls; and whitewashed religious schools, or madrassas, trimmed in Day-Glo orange, green, and blue. Above one of these schools, on a bald hillside in the garrison town of Razmak, in North Waziristan, until recently white rocks spelled out a tribute to the Taliban’s one-eyed commander: “long live mullah omar.” The surrounding land once belonged to the Faqir of Ipi, a Muslim holy man who trounced the British in a series of military engagements throughout the nineteen-thirties.

That day, Khalid was taking me to see a school in Sin Tanga, a remote valley in North Waziristan. On either side of the fresh macadam, the land stretched away into desert. We travelled with Khalid’s sidekick, Ayub, a soft-spoken man with a caterpillar mustache, and two local leaders. One of them, Malik Tawiz Khan, wore a glossy black turban and rode next to Khalid, who was driving a cousin’s green Suzuki. A red toothbrush poked out from Malik Tawiz Khan’s vest pocket as he turned to talk to Ayub and me, in the back seat. Khalid translated. Malik Tawiz Khan had opened the school that we were going to visit, he said, but he wanted more help than the government was providing. The Pakistani government awards contracts for schools, hospitals, and water projects to local maliks. But corruption is so rampant that the villagers receive very little. The school in Sin Tanga was a rare example of one that actually functioned.

As we lurched over an unfinished section of the road, Malik Tawiz Khan kept jabbing a stubby finger out the jeep window and repeating, “Khan Bahadur,” to indicate that the wasteland around us belonged to Khalid. Khalid smiled, and explained that he had his own plan for combatting the influence of radical Islam. It doesn’t include military action. (“Kill one terrorist, make ten,” he says.) Instead, he wants to build schools, hospitals, agriculture projects, and wells.

It’s a familiar argument in these parts: only education and economic development can counterbalance the ignorance and fury that breed religious fanaticism. For Khalid, though, the argument is less about enlightenment than about Realpolitik. “The mullah gives a man one meal, we will give him two,” he said. In the tribal belt, where wells are as scarce as schools, the religious leaders serve all the needs of the community. Development, according to Khalid, will undermine the authority of radical Islam by demonstrating to the tribesmen that they needn’t rely blindly on mullahs for their subsistence.

Malik Tawiz Khan turned in his seat and offered me a simpler imperative. Pulling a .30-calibre pistol from his gray vest and holding it to his temple in the jiggling car, he said, “If you people give us education, we will shoot the mullahs!” A few minutes later, he added, “No foreigners can come here without permission. If you came here alone, we would shoot you.” He raised the gun to his temple again, with greater flourish. It was just another way of flattering Khan Bahadur, who was acting as my protector.

I said, “How are ‘we’ supposed to build schools if our very presence here is forbidden?” He didn’t answer.

As we passed the dry gulch of the Khaisor Ravine, two small boys with slingshots and a girl in a cranberry-colored head scarf jumped for the low branches of an acacia tree. In the absence of school, Khalid explained, children are sent out to forage for the day’s meal. Then he showed me an irrigation ditch that he had built recently, a cement flood wall to redirect water—when there is water—into the arid hillside. Just above the wall was the only patch of green we’d seen for sixty miles, an oasis of thin trees that swayed in the breeze. In its center stood a gleaming white three-story madrassa, belonging to the Jamait-e-Ulema-e-Islam (J.U.I.) Party, the most militant group in a six-party Islamist alliance that now governs Pakistan’s frontier region. Many of the madrassas preach a form of radical Islam akin to Wahhabism. They also feed, clothe, and educate many of the children of Khalid’s tribe.

“These people are impressed with the madrassas,” Khalid said. Since the local people fetch water at the religious school, Khalid had chosen to give his tribesmen another option: a secular water source. “What will the need be of the madrassa?” Khalid asked, pointing to the scrolls and frills that edged the roofline of the local seminary like frosting on a wedding cake. “It’s built only to impress people.” In such extreme poverty, the promise of the heavenly palace was mesmerizing. Khalid sniffed in disgust. We’d been driving for two hours, and the heat was making him cranky.

Finally, as cliffs rose on either side of us and we snaked along a narrow, flesh-colored canyon, we took a sharp turn in the road and came upon Sin Tanga: several clusters of five or six low-slung mud houses set into the crook of the cliff wall. The name means “the place between two hills.” Behind a padlocked blue gate stood a broken wheat thresher and a squat mud building. A small door opened in the gate, and a teen-age boy beckoned us in. He must have heard the engine of the car from miles away. This was the school, a ten-by-twenty-foot room, which smelled like straw and sweat. High on the mud walls, someone had chalked stick figures riding in airplanes and buses. They looked like hieroglyphs. The teacher, a man named Asmatullah, seemed surprised to see us. Covered in dust and blinking as if he’d just woken up, he came in quickly behind us. There were no classes that day; Asmatullah lived three and a half hours away from the school, so he held classes only when he could make the journey, and sometimes not even then. We were in luck to find him hanging around. There was no water and no electricity. For an outlying community of roughly sixteen hundred children, Asmatullah said, this was the only secular school; the local madrassa opposed his more liberal interpretation of Islam. He taught about a hundred children—boys between the ages of four and fifteen, girls up to the age of eight. After the age of eight, girls generally stay at home.

Malik Tawiz Khan had made his point: the school needed funding. But Khalid didn’t promise any further aid. “My breath is stopping here—in this dirty place,” he said. “How can people learn here?”

He wanted to get moving; the longer we stayed, the more likely it was that other tribesmen would hear of our visit and discover an American in their midst. Khalid pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, went outside, and opened the car door. As we left the village, we passed a teen-age boy carrying an AK-47 in one hand and a bouquet of yellow flowers in the other. The boy smiled. We slowed down. He handed the bouquet through the window to Khalid, who held it to his nose and seemed pleased.

We stopped in the village of Rajikhel for a late lunch, and filed into a high-ceilinged room in the chowk, a crossroads where men gather. (Owing to the presence of women, they cannot visit one another’s houses.) The room was shadowy and cool, and we blinked in the darkness. A row of pink plastic roses, carefully potted in copper planters, ran down the center of this men-only chamber. (I was allowed inside in deference to the Khan.) The men flopped onto pink pillows and stretched their legs before them. A young man served us Sprite and asked me questions, saying that he was entering the Pakistani Army in the hope of becoming a United Nations peacekeeper. There was no other job. The men here were fond of Khalid, he said, because a year ago the young man’s brother had been kidnapped by a rival tribe while driving. After the brother escaped from his captors, Khalid had helped to negotiate the vehicle’s release.

As we spoke, a bucktoothed malik of seventy, with a drawn face and a gray turban, stooped through the door and sat down next to the Khan Bahadur. He was Malik Zenghi Bar Khan, and he had once served as a bodyguard for Khalid’s grandfather. Carrying a long staff of blond wood, he crossed his legs Indian style, put his hands on his knees, and looked at Khalid. The men grew quiet. It was clear that their elder was waiting to speak. His complaint concerned the Pakistani government. “They put me in prison,” he said.

The other men burst into laughter; the idea of this distinguished old man finding himself in jail amused them. Malik Zenghi Bar Khan stared at Khalid, and went on, “Several weeks ago, I travelled to the office of the political agent”—the government’s appointed representative in North Waziristan—“to present a chit for my salary. The political agent threw me into prison because I was from Shawal”—a region straddling the Afghan border, where Osama bin Laden is said to be hiding. A major and a sepoy in the Pakistani Army had recently been killed there by unknown assailants. According to the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a 1901 code of Draconian laws that the tribesmen call “black laws,” the political agent has the right to do whatever he wants. Under the law of collective responsibility, he can punish an entire tribe for the actions of one man. After a night in prison, Zenghi Bar Khan exchanged his son, Rizwanullah, who is twenty-two, for himself. The political agent held the young man for a week until the tribesmen agreed to raise a lashkar, or posse, of six hundred men, to go from house to house in Shawal and check for Al Qaeda members. The lashkar, like dozens of other efforts the government had made at strong-arming the tribesmen into policing themselves, was useless. Zenghi Bar Khan was outraged that he, a former soldier, had been punished for someone else’s crimes. Besides, there was no proof that the tribesmen were even responsible for the murders.

Khalid poked the old man in the ribs. “You went to the political agent without my permission,” he said, laughing again, rather than addressing the government’s right to arrest an old man and his son. “If you go on your own, it’s your responsibility.”

As Khalid sucked the marrow from a chicken bone, Zenghi Bar Khan said firmly, “Your grandfather would have gone to the political agent directly.”

The revival of radical Islam in Waziristan is relatively recent. At the time of Partition, in 1947, the Pashtuns, deeply unhappy about being part of Pakistan, argued for their own independent “Pukhtunistan.” The effort, which was supported by both Gandhi and Nehru, was largely secular. “The most important change is that the tribal areas used to be Pashtun nationalists,” Husain Haqqani, of the Carnegie Endowment, told me. “The change that has taken place since the nineteen-eighties is that they see themselves as Muslim and Pashtun.”

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, in 1979, the convenient myth of the “uncontrollable” nature of the tribal belt gave the Pakistani ruler General Zia ul-Haq the cover he needed to wage jihad against the Soviets from bases there. Zia was the first of Pakistan’s leaders to adopt Islam in an effort to legitimatize his military rule. Soon, with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence network, the C.I.A. was funnelling millions of dollars and weapons through the tribal areas. The region became a hothouse in which to grow radical Islam, sustained by a network of Saudi-funded madrassas that taught Deobandism, which calls for the rejection of modernity. In the late eighties, after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, the United States, too, abandoned the region. The results were dramatic. Most Wazirs have bitter stories about the sudden disappearance of international aid. Khalid’s aunt Maryam Bibi, who was working in Afghan refugee camps at the time, said that within a few years many schools had closed down for lack of funding. “This gave birth to such extreme things,” she told me. “All these mosques were going up, but our people were so powerless and the mosques did nothing for them.”

The Saudi-funded madrassas remained. Now there are at least three thousand madrassas registered in the North-West Frontier Province and thousands more unregistered. Much of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime was educated in these seminaries. Only a minority of the madrassas preach a radical form of Islam, but some of the most radical are in the tribal areas.

One reason that Pakistan welcomed the Taliban’s religious movement was that it worked against secular Pashtun nationalism, which, because of the country’s long-standing rivalry with Afghanistan, was viewed as the greater danger. Waziristan was caught in the middle. “In the tribal areas, politics has been banned for almost fifty years. It’s a no-go area for normal electoral patterns,” Aqil Shah, a political analyst in Washington, said. “In this way, it’s probably a more sophisticated manifestation of the Raj.” Until 1997, only the maliks could vote. In the absence of self-representation, the Wazirs effectively had no rights, and the fundamentalists stepped in to fill the vacuum.

In October, 2002, for the first time in more than fifty years, an exclusively Islamist government took power in the North-West Frontier Province. The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, a six-party Islamist alliance, was elected on an anti-American platform. Yet the rise of the Islamist alliance was fuelled not only by popular support but also by Islamabad’s manipulation of political power. President Musharraf has used Islamists to strengthen Pakistan’s bid for Kashmir and to weaken his secular opponents. The result is that he has effectively insured that he is the only secular solution for Pakistan. It’s a strategy that Husain Haqqani calls “après moi les Islamistes.” In Waziristan, the alliance between the Pakistani military and the Taliban regime makes it difficult to pursue those harboring Al Qaeda members. The resurgence of the Taliban in the region also serves the Pakistani military, which tends to view the Taliban leaders and other fundamentalists as strategic assets in Afghanistan.

In March, Musharraf held a tribal jirga, attended by Khalid, at which the President assured the tribesmen that no military operations would take place without their consent. Within hours, the military launched an attack near Wana, announcing to the world that it had cornered a “high-value target” in South Waziristan. Some officers identified the target as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, but this claim was quickly disputed. A twelve-day battle ensued between Islamic militants and Pakistani troops, and the Pakistani military was surprised by the fierce resistance. It turned out that the “high-value target” was probably Tahir Yuldashev, the head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. He escaped, along with hundreds of his followers. The campaign was widely considered a debacle.

Two weeks later, three Wazir men—a father and his two sons, all of whom had fought for the United States against the Soviets—drove me through a rubble-strewn village near Wana named Kaloosha. The most talkative of the group was the younger of the sons, a thirty-three-year-old in a Chitrali cap who was a construction worker in Dubai. He gave me a full reënactment, with sound effects, of a pitched battle that had recently taken place. His older brother and his white-haired father, one eye opaque with cataracts, nodded and said little. The men were members of a subtribe of the Wazirs which the Pakistani Army has punished vigorously for harboring Al Qaeda. The Army had just withdrawn after destroying eighty-three of their homes, and had imposed a two-day deadline for surrender. As we drove around, the mud structures looked as if a giant had smashed them with his fist. In the midst of the destruction, a field of violet poppies was in bloom. It was early evening, and the light made the petals translucent.

The now homeless tribesmen sat by the roadside and waved listlessly as we drove past. My host pointed to a small white tent across a muddy field. “We must turn around,” he said. The tent belonged to a Pakistani Talib named Mohammed Sharif, a leader of the resistance to Pakistan’s incursions who was now on the country’s most-wanted list. “If Sharif sees us, he’ll ask us in for tea,” he said. Tea could pose a problem: my presence would be misunderstood, at the very least. My host, who told me he’d seen Americans in a camp nearby, said that most tribesmen believed that all Westerners were spies and in league with their newfound enemy, the Pakistani government. If it weren’t for the Taliban, he said, and the help of bin Laden after the Americans pulled out of Afghanistan, in the late eighties, the Pashtuns would be finished now.

I asked him why he wasn’t fighting with his fellow-tribesmen against the Pakistani Army, and, by proxy, against the United States.

It wasn’t worth it, he said. At least, not yet. Although his family had been terrorized by the operation, he would rather go back to Dubai to make money for them. Another reason for his ambivalence was the fact that the Pakistani soldiers are fellow-Muslims.

We returned to my host’s mud compound. In the courtyard, a crop of green shoots had yet to bloom. I peered into the gathering darkness and asked if he was growing cabbage. He looked at me. “Poppy,” he said. “Here, you won’t find one man in a hundred thousand who smokes.” He meant that since heroin is for export to non-Muslims the fact that its growth is haram, or forbidden, can be overlooked. The hard-liners will tell you that if their crop kills one non-Muslim the drug has done its job. But my host just wanted the money. We sat in his large hujra, or reception room; the walls were lined in pink and green velour. Under a cloth embroidered with red poppies, my host kept a television, but, he said, he never turned it on. There is rarely any electricity, and he can’t afford a generator. The Pakistani government pumps billions of rupees’ worth of electricity into the tribal area each year, but the tribesmen are reluctant to pay for it and try to pirate it instead, so the government turns it off frequently. Villages have gone to war with each other over access to pirated lines. (Khalid says this pirated electricity is one more example of the Wazirs’ religious hypocrisy: “They wash their faces to pray, but they have no qualms about stealing power.”)

Two tribesmen appeared in the doorway. One, with curly bobbed hair and a vacant look, sat against a wall. The other, a sombre-looking man, was a local photographer. More than six and a half feet tall, he sat down and sketched a map of the militants’ camps that were still operating about ten miles away, as well as those which had been flattened several months earlier. Local merchants had been sending vast orders of groceries out to the camps, and the foreigners paid generously, he said. He himself had been rounded up in a Pakistani raid, and later released, after the Army destroyed photographs he had taken of Pashtun Pakistani soldiers raising their hands in the air and refusing to fight fellow-Pashtuns. I asked him about the man sitting against the wall. His arm was in a sling. Apparently, several weeks before, during the operation, he was injured and thirteen members of his family were killed when a Pakistani helicopter gunship mistook them for fleeing jihadis.

We drank tea as curious children collected at the door. My host shooed them away and passed me a china bowl of sugar-coated pistachios. As his brother lit an oversized kerosene lamp, I asked my host if he had seen any Al Qaeda or Taliban militants coming through the area after the recent war in Afghanistan.

“I am Taliban,” he said. “We all are.”

In Peshawar, I went to see Lateef Afridi, a sixty-year-old tribal politician. He has wispy white hair and an avian nose, and, when he cocked his head to listen, I was reminded of a peregrine falcon. As he spoke, he slipped his feet in and out of plastic slippers. Afridi, a former member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, decided not to run in the last election, he said. His grandson wandered into the room, climbed into his lap, and fell asleep. Afridi said that he wanted no part in the elections once he saw that the Pakistani government was setting the stage for the region’s current fundamentalist government to win. “The I.S.I.”—Pakistan’s intelligence service—“planned that these religious people would take power along the border,” he said, absent-mindedly patting the top of his grandson’s head. The fundamentalist presence along the Afghan border served the government’s purpose, he said. Because of the threat the fundamentalists posed, the United States would give Pakistan whatever it wanted. The Americans also wouldn’t dare come after bin Laden. Yet, he went on, in the tribal areas the I.S.I.’s old links with the fundamentalists had been strained. “The I.S.I. is facing the very people it groomed and protected,” he said.

Afridi’s daughter-in-law, a schoolteacher, came into the room with a bowl of quartered sugar melons that were the same shade of green as sea glass. She spooned the fruit onto two small plates while Afridi spoke of the catastrophic failure of the Pakistani Army’s operations in Waziristan. “In Wana, fear of and respect for the Pakistani Army have vanished,” he said. “The Army was the one organization that was respected.”

Also, he said, the romanticized notion of pashtunwali, or tribal code, which meant that Pashtuns would die for any stranger at their gate, was naïve. The code is intended to protect the weakest members within the tribe. For outsiders, the laws of panah (refuge) and melmastia (hospitality) have their limits. “As far as a foreigner is concerned,” he said, “if he takes refuge in my house and has enemies, then it doesn’t apply.” He went on, “Al Qaeda among us is not about refuge. If anyone is going to be the cause of war for me, then his moral obligation is to leave.” Also, he said, Al Qaeda was paying local tribesmen inflated prices for food and shelter, and to help mount cross-border raids in Afghanistan. “This is earning, not pashtunwali,” he said. In the tribal areas, where there is no other employment to speak of, the influx of the militants’ money was just one more means by which they gained influence. “We can’t resist money,” he said.

On my last trip into Waziristan, I visited Shawal, the most isolated and conservative area, which had just been targeted as the likeliest hideout of Osama bin Laden. Driving for six hours into the mountains along the Durand line with a baby-faced local tribesman, I watched the flat pewter of the land around us turn green: the Findhorn of Waziristan. The air blew thin and cold around us. The red road, which the Army had just blasted into the mountainside, was littered with giant pinecones, and monkeys skittered in front of our truck. The Wazirs who lived here, mostly woodcutters, had vehemently opposed the building of the road, my tribal friend said. Two years ago, they had considered all vehicles un-Islamic, including bicycles. As with the Taliban regime, across the border, their understanding of Sharia was heavily influenced by tribal code. All education and any form of modernity were anathema, and still are. The Pakistani Army buzzed the Wazirs with helicopters and warned them that if they did not allow the road to be built American troops would land on their soil, my friend said. Now, reportedly, lumberjacks were being paid to guide Al Qaeda through the mountains. According to local journalists, Osama bin Laden had abandoned his Arab bodyguards in favor of Wazirs, who to a Predator drone camera would appear simply as woodcutters and shepherds.

We passed a three-story structure built against a cliff. It had a wooden roof, and smoke came from its courtyard, but, except for a ring of axes against distant pine trees, there was no sign of human activity. The tribesmen were chopping down the trees as fast as they could, to hoard them, my friend said, in case the Army tried to steal the wood when it arrived. They had no idea what to expect from outsiders.

Eventually, we passed two old women carrying enormous bundles of wood on their heads. They stared at us. We stopped the truck. The women, chuckling, climbed into its bed. As we made our way back down the mountain, they shrieked at every lurch. “They’ve never ridden in a vehicle before,” my friend said, looking in the rearview mirror. On either side of us, the mountain was now a mass of stumps, in the middle of which power grids glinted in the sun, the wires for carrying current not yet hung between them. Finally, the women wanted to get down. We’d driven at least ten miles.

On our way back, we hit a straightaway of new macadam, near the Army post at Razmak. Workmen laying the tar stood by their new road and watched as a convoy of Pakistani tanks and Army trucks passed by. The soldiers looked down at us while we waited. They were wearing goggles. Above, perched on a cliff, was a massive fort that the British had built at the highest point they could find: Alexander Fort. Watching the convoy go by was like watching history repeat itself: the Army swarming over inhospitable land to battle an invisible enemy among the tribesmen, who grew increasingly enraged.

A hundred miles away, Khalid’s grandfather, the first Khan Bahadur, is buried behind the village of Janikhel. His grave—a collection of blanched stones—looks like every other one of the thousand or so plots in the barren wasteland. “In Islam, we don’t make graves with bricks, because it will take too much land,” Khalid said one day when we visited. “After fifty, sixty years, the grave should be gone.” That day, he pointed to a stand of anemic acacia trees and made another pitch for his schools. “See how these trees are without fruit?” he said. “The people are like this.We say their minds are dry. You make this area very green, and everything will be O.K.”

Khalid wouldn’t let me spend much time in the graveyard. Bandits and killers are sometimes exiled here. Also, around his village, the Islamist presence has become aggressive, as the leaders feel more threatened by the influx of secular development. Khalid’s aunt Maryam Bibi, a thickset woman in her fifties with deep lines under her eyes, thinks that her nephew hasn’t been forceful enough as Khan Bahadur. “He’s enjoying the authority without the wisdom,” she said, but she thought he’d grow into the job. Also, she said, any inherited authority—including her family’s—has its limits.

As a woman, Maryam Bibi has challenged both Pashtun and Islamic strictures. When she was in her twenties, she was forced to marry a cousin who was a schizophrenic. Although he beat her, Maryam had to stay with him. Clandestinely, she tried to start a variety of small businesses from home: buying a rickshaw for someone else to drive; selling buffalo milk. Finally, Maryam was allowed to take a job outside the house with a women’s organization. Today, with foreign funding, she runs a non-governmental organization of her own, Sister’s Home, which since 1993 has enrolled seven thousand girls in eighty new schools. “Information is a huge part of power dynamics,” she told me. But some politicized religious leaders in her native village called her “un-Islamic.” At one heated meeting, she shouted at them, “Who says who is a good Muslim? If I gave out visas, each of you would go to America!” In response, they have banned her work. Last year, when she attempted to build a school, she was driven away by fifty armed Talibs.

Recently, when the people of a nearby village asked Maryam for help in establishing a school, she hired a young Wazir girl, Bushra, whose parents were very poor and welcomed the idea. Bushra went to Lahore for training. But when she tried to reënter the tribal area, a few weeks ago, a group of armed men blocked the road. Bushra told the driver to keep going. If she were taken hostage, even for a night, she said, her honor would be ruined. As the car sped on, the men fired their weapons, wounding both Bushra and the driver, but they got away. Maryam Bibi is sickened by the incident. “People say that we were trying to work in the most dangerous area,” she said. “But this is my village, and we’ve been doing this work for over a decade. The reality is you have to work in the most remote areas—you have to spend your life there—or all of your political statements mean nothing.” ♦